RPS Best Friend For Life Richard Cobbett went freelance last week, abandoning his “Ma-gasine” (which I gather is like an overweight pamphlet) to live off nothing but his charm, wit and contacts. As we’d hate to see Richard starve, we offered him the chance to go and play the latest build of Dungeon Siege III for us. Has this franchise been changed for the console-devices after all? The truth follows.
One question kept coming to mind while playing the first section of Dungeon Siege III. Who gets to name all the loot? Seriously. Can any rubbish old blacksmith hiccup while forging a sword, end up with some distorted, twisted piece of metal, and still happily sell it to the nearest adventurer as the Rapier of Transcendental Virtue or the Bastard Sword of Maihrse? It would explain why most of it just ends up being dumped in unlocked chests for any passer-by to get their hands on.

But Dungeon Siege III isn’t judgemental. It loves treasure. Any treasure. All treasure, from the overambitious swords to the deeply unflattering pauldrons. Its treasure chests don’t so much hold gold and trinkets and all the other RPG trappings as belch them out, ready for you to hoover them all up into a big sack and hurl them at the nearest shopkeeper.

What? Heroes don’t count. They LOOT.

Being a Dungeon Siege game, this obsession for anything that can be sold, equipped, or used to stab people won’t be a surprise. The first game gave you a sturdy pack-mule companion for a reason, and it wasn’t in case felt peckish in the middle of your quest. Oddly though, that’s about the only connection I really saw to the original games while playing a taster slice of the sequel. Here’s the other. The action is still set in Ehb, the fantasy kingdom named after an apathetic sigh, but takes place long, long after both the original games and that dreadful Uwe Boll movie have faded into history. And actually besieging a dungeon played no part in things. Again.

Everything else though? Changed. The characters are new. The look is new, with a new engine, and some strikingly strong and omnipresent depth of field that makes the new heroes look like they need a trip to Specsavers before they even think about heading out to save the world. Even the developers are new, with those RPG heroes and plucky entomologists at Obsidian now handling the franchise for Square-Enix, and original creator Chris Taylor only consulting.

The most noticeable change though is that while this isn’t the first Dungeon Siege on consoles (there was Throne of Agony on the PSP, which I’ve never played because I don’t even want the smell of that thing in my house), Dungeon Siege III really, really borrows from the Xbox and PS3 arcade-RPG playbooks. Where the old ones were like Diablo, this feels closer to Fable.

The result is a completely different game – or to be more exact, about four or five different games, thrown into a blender and pureed. From every other console hack-and-slash, we get the new camera and control systems – now up close (with the option to pull back a bit) to better follow your hero as you mash buttons to swing your sword and unleash the fury. Talk to a character and the Mass Effect conversation wheel pops up. Facing multiple enemies? You can switch between multiple combat styles, just like The Witcher. Get lost? Fable’s golden breadcrumb trail will point you in the right direction – although unlike Fable, it only appears on command, so you shouldn’t have that same sense of being dragged by the nose from encounter to encounter. Etc.

None of this was bad in itself. Really, it all seemed fine, I thought, as I picked up green health orbs and slammed my shield into enemies hard enough to leave an imprint of the crest on their ghosts. Still, it felt underwhelming. I wanted something new. Something… more.

I didn’t really see it in the bit of the game I got to play, nor was Square talking anything they weren’t directly showing, but there were a couple of hints at things that might be coming later on when I got to the first proper town. Its name is Raven’s Rill, and it’s your entirely generic fantasy village with a slight Slavic flavour, surrounded by a terrifying army of walking experience points called the Lescanzi. A good starting point for an quest, at least, and when you’re a hero, you go where you’re needed. My will was strong, my sword was true. And my bags were empty.

In true RPG style, the place was quiet, but combat clearly wasn’t going to be very far away. For starters, as soon as I showed up, I was met by a ridiculous looking girl called Katarina in an incredibly hardworking +2 Corset of Holding, who warned me of a nasty ambush just outside the town gates. Since ambushes in RPGs only ever mean “Yippee! More loot!”, that didn’t seem like a huge problem, but I figured heroic honour demanded at least chatting to the locals and doing their inevitable odd-jobs first. Needless to say, they had plenty – but the style was slightly unexpected. I was expecting quick and dirty mission briefings, like the ones most hack-and-slash games throw in to pad things out. Instead, the appearance of the dialogue wheel quickly reminded me that I was playing an Obsidian game, and that they like their talky bits.

Dungeon Siege III offers far, far more dialogue than most hack-and-slash games, with full conversations, optional subjects to chat about, and proper back-story. This is good. Most of it is clearly optional, but its presence hopefully means a bit more narrative weight behind the later hack and slashing, as well as a return of Obsidian staples like proper relationships with companion characters and maybe even some decent choices. I doubt we’ll see the villain of the piece delivering lectures on Hegelian dialetics like in New Vegas, but every little helps.

The most intriguing bit though came once I’d been given a mission, dutifully headed off to put my sword through its face and take its stuff, and returned. Now, in a game whose name is synonymous with ‘give me more stuff’, I had the option to… turn down a reward. How… odd.

Selecting this option purely in the name of scientific investigation, the conversation ended with my hero brushing off my act of heroism on the grounds that maybe the person I was talking to would speak well of the noble 10th Legion he was trying to rebuild to challenge Ehb’s current Big Bad. It may be nothing. It may just the Lawful Stupid option, and whenever you choose it, a little red light may flash in Obsidian’s office so that everyone to laugh at the pathetic little boy-scout. But let’s hope not. The way it was presented least smacked of the possibility of some kind of Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood type metagame involving building the Legion later on, if only to grow it to the point that it can’t fit in the back of a Ford Cortina and still give everyone a window seat.

The rest of the demo area stuck to pure hack-and-slash though, kicking off by getting directions from one of Katarina’s friends, another girl who apparently put all her talent points in Dual Weapon Specialisation, and then taking on a few of the Lescanzi witches and paid goons in traditional one-on-twenty combat. This being an action RPG, this was still lousy odds for them, and it didn’t take long to get to their leader – an evil-eyed crone who was willing to chat for a quite a while, even if attempts to defuse the situation with words instead of swords didn’t quite work out. We fought. I lost. I blamed it on a bug. And that was the end of the demo. I may not have saved the world, but at least I died with lots and lots of its gold in my pocket.

Last Friday at the RPS meet-up I asked Kieron if they could get you to write for RPS. Funny you should say that he replied (I paraphrase) because today he’s just left Future and something will be appearing soon. One week later and here you are! :)

Well if they live in a world with orcs and stuff they may as well write in some lore about magic breast enlargement. Actually I heard the Witcher books have that, at least I know they have magic sex toys.

Unlikely. It seems like a traditional feudal system, where the peasants would be lucky for a few square feet to call their own. Possibly the luckier ones might have between one and two rooms, although likely shared with younger siblings or relatives. There is of course the perpetual hope of social reform to equalise the obvious imbalance between their state and that of the ruling classes, but I doubt that Dungeon Siege III will go into that in any great detail. As far as I can tell, its poor characters have yet to become enlightened enough to realise that there are giant treasure chests full of gold roughly twenty steps from their hovels with which they might enforce the social reform denied them by their so-called ‘betters’. One day, gods of Ehb willing, they shall.

The first town was dire (I was deeply unimpressed when the shopkeeper asked me to find something for him, I picked it up to have a better idea of what it was and he promptly called me a thief and kicked me out), but the game as a whole just didn’t do it for me. If I remember correctly, the big problems for me were the combat, which I just didn’t enjoy at all, and the overblown scale of everything. It felt like a game that just didn’t know when to stop, which is great if you’re enjoying it. But in that case, I wasn’t. So, well, y’know. Sorry!

(I had a very similar problem with the start of Beyond Divinity, where a relatively simple escape kept being interrupted by everything from trips to a pocket dimension to constant backtracking. I’m sure I remember one bit from that where you have a choice of corridors, and if you go down the wrong one, the game has a sign that says – pretty much – ‘Ha-Ha!’ and spawns some tough monsters behind you. I never even made it out of the starting dungeon in that one because it just never seemed to be ending, and eventually I just decided “Oh, to hell with this…” That game sorely needed an editor.)

Maybe I’ll download DD from GOG at some point and give it another shot. I’ve meant to for a while, but just not had the time. I know that lots of people like it, and while you can’t write a review based how people are likely to respond, anything with so many people hailing it as one of the best RPGs ever usually warrants at least a second look, especially so many years on.

Combat had some kind of slugginess to it yeah which I blame on the animations and the fact the developers wanted a mix between Diablo II (direct attack) and BG (pause). Though I was intrigued by the first town too many stuff went on underground in the beginning, there are some ways I think to skip some of that. There is a reason DD is compared to Ultima though, it allowed for plenty of puzzles and item combinations (you can indeed pick up everything) and going out out of the starting town opens up that addictive feeling of exploring the huge area until the last blacked out part of your map is gone (again, à la BG). You can break quests with such freedom of course, the game isn’t prepared for that. The odd stuff of attacking a critter making all critters in the world hostile is something I could stand.

Don’t bother with BD I’d say, I know I didn’t (too many bugs, not enough freedom, poor randomised battlefields). DD2 with its addon (Dragon Knight Saga) is relatively decent stuff, though not as open as the first game.

I like the sound of a DS game with some actual, you know, OOMPH to it. The series always seemed like it was having more fun playing itself than I was. I’m looking forward to this one.

The PSP game was shit. It’s difficulty curve actually went downwards due to the passives being so strong, it was buggy – at one point I was gaining an entire experience level per kill! – with very slow loading times, and the loot was… insanely good. I one-shotted the final boss, and I hadn’t been trying to optimise my character at all.

Welcome Richard! My favourite games site just got better, and I didn’t have to pay or anything. It’s like coming home and discovering someone broke into your house to upgrade your graphics card.

Seeing as how it is Obsidian, I have no doubts the story and the dialogue is going to be top notch. But how was the gameplay? Was it balanced, exciting, visceral, cerebral? Did any superlatives apply? And, dare I mention it, how was the stability? Perhaps too early to tell?

Too early to say on the stability. For the rest, as I said above, it seemed like a pretty standard hack-and-slash in terms of mechanics. Quite a few skills to unlock, each with multiple levels and a couple of branching paths for specialisation, a few passives and so on, but for the purposes of the demo, I was a low-level character and so more or less just whacking stuff with a sword and occasionally hitting them with a shield. Can’t really comment on balance or scale – I didn’t have enough time with it.

Since Mr. Cobbett seems to be replying to everyone on this thread, maybe he’ll reply to me! I’ll get a salmon-colored box below my post like all the cool kids!

Edit: Oh, and I don’t necessarily see an issue with making DS3 with a more console-like direct-action form of combat, while I loved Diablo II and Torchlight, clicking everywhere was slightly more … detached from the combat experience. Of course, both of those games were not actually about “combat experience”, but LOOT, as you note.

“Oh, and I don’t necessarily see an issue with making DS3 with a more console-like direct-action form of combat”

I don’t have a problem with that either. To be honest, Obsidian’s involvement interests me far more than the fact that it’s a Dungeon Siege game. It’s more that the bits I played felt just a bit too generic for comfort, and I’m hoping there’s some twist or a bit of extra stuff later on that makes it more than just another nicely done hack-and-slash.

Yeah, if there’s a franchise that could use a spot of consolization, it’s Dungeon Siege, the ARPG that literally ran itself. And, hey, I liked the PSP Throne of Agony far better than the main franchise. As someone said above, it’s ridiculously unbalanced and towards the end of the game you are almost certainly capable of causing entire areas full of monsters to explode just by breathing on them (actually, I can’t remember if this was the game with the equipment effect that causes enemies to die just by entering visual range, if so, this would literally be possible). But it’s a lot more active and engaging than the main franchise, the art is actually kind of lovely, and the character classes are all potentially interesting in their own horribly unbalanced ways.

“I don’t have a problem with that either. To be honest, Obsidian’s involvement interests me far more than the fact that it’s a Dungeon Siege game.”

Mmm, exactly. My favourite ARPGs by far have always been the Icewind Dale games, which featured impeccable atmosphere and scene-setting dialogue, without ever getting in the way of the combat (which had considerable depth, being 3rd Edition DnD). Come to think of it, a number of the folks on that team will be working on DS3 too.

DS1 absolutely ‘ran itself’, to the point where I was actually thinking of other things whilst playing, at least in single player. Hmm, maybe I could get some washing-up done and just leave a paperweight on the left mouse button…

I loved New Vegas. I had issues with it, notably how empty a lot of it felt, and New Vegas itself being pretty crap (especially compared to New Reno), but still had a phenomenal time with it. I really like Obsidian’s work, even if it is often a little – cough – rough around the edges.

I think that most people got disappointed by Vegas because they thought the strip was Vegas, whereas Vegas is actually made up of The Strip, Freeside, Westside, the northern farming area, and South Vegas. The Strip’s just one neighbourhood.

I had to reply to say at least I appreciated what you did there.. I know you’re waiting with bated breath! Though I think the funniest line in the review was about the little red light in the dev’s office.. it just gave me the giggles :D

Still, a good foundation for your work here at RPS, I look forward to more I-liners…

Too early to say, really. If it’s the standard WASD to move, other keys for special attacks, and the mouse for camera controls and attacks, it should be fine. Although as with all of these games, I think rumble will be missed when it comes to making the attacks feel solid.

Why the heck are Obsidian dispensing with DS’s USP – that of party-based combat? That was the only thing that was going to make it stand out from the crowd. And what a crowd: Skyrim, Dragon Age 2, Diablo 3, to name but er…three.

Swear I’d never buy another Ob.game after the travesty that was New Vegas anyway. But replaying DS at the mo has got me hankering for a high-res party-based effort. But this decision to remove the franchises biggest selling point is just plain mad.

Yeah I was confused about that after reading this article too, but according to Gamespot’s preview:

“In the full release, you’ll be able to manage a party of up to four heroes, either in a single-player game where you control all four characters, or with a group of three other people in co-op mode. Two players may share the screen locally, and you can bring in two more players online. The other players will serve as assistants to one main player, and no progress will be carried over to their game. “

I still remember DS2 where my party was a dual wielder musculus macho, a mule, a lynx and a ladybug. No other people was needed to get to the end and literally rape the last boss the first time around.